Plot
Paul Armstrong (Sean Connery), a liberal Harvard professor opposed to capital punishment, is persuaded to go to Florida, to investigate the conviction of Bobby Earl Ferguson (Blair Underwood) for murder. Ferguson, a former Cornell University student, is a highly intelligent, charming, and articulate black man who was convicted of raping and murdering a young white girl. Armstrong must save him from being executed in the electric chair. Ferguson tells Armstrong that he was tortured by a racist police detective to get a confession. As Armstrong digs deeper into the case, he discovers that Tanny Brown (Laurence Fishburne), the chief detective on the case, did indeed coerce Ferguson's confession.
The plot thickens when Ferguson tells the professor that the murder was actually committed by Blair Sullivan (Ed Harris), a serial killer awaiting execution, who later reveals the location of the weapon used to kill the girl. When Armstrong discovers the weapon, Brown tries to threaten him into abandoning the investigation. (It is revealed that the murdered girl was Brown's daughter's best friend.) Ferguson gets a re-trial and is freed from prison.
Armstrong then receives a call from Sullivan, who asks him to visit his parents. Armstrong is shocked to find the butchered bodies of Sullivan's parents, and returns demanding an explanation. Sullivan gloats that he and Ferguson struck a deal: Ferguson would kill Sullivan's parents in exchange for freedom, while Sullivan would claim responsibility for the girl's murder. It turns out that Ferguson committed the crime for which he was imprisoned, and used Armstrong to release him from death row.
Armstrong and Brown go after Ferguson, who desires revenge on Armstrong's wife (Kate Capshaw); she was the prosecutor in a previous rape trial which, while thrown out of court, resulted in him being brutalized and castrated in jail, as well as being kicked out of Cornell, robbing him of any chance of a future. Ferguson plans to murder Armstrong's wife and daughter (Scarlett Johansson) and then feed them to alligators, but Armstrong and Brown come to the rescue. They kill Ferguson and save Armstrong's family.
Read more about this topic: Just Cause (film)
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“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)